“… [The] number one rule is that if you write about your life there must be a redemptive moment because people like that…

So, okay. I try to see that. I mean, I’ve read plenty of memoirs—Girl, Interrupted, Smashed, Darkness Visible—all good books. All very redemptive at the end, for sure. But I’ve also read Anna Karenina. Well, I haven’t, but I’m able to spoil the ending for you right now anyway… She gets hit by a train. I think she kills herself.

That seems redemptive to me. I mean, at least she doesn’t have to wake up to her same problems every day.

I have told this to my… agent. She said that people do not want to read about my fascination with suicide.”

Diablo Cody asks the original “Misery Chick”, Daria Morgendorffer, if her crush, Trent Lane, and the other “Trents of the world are ever suited to long-term relationships…?”. Daria’s response?

“I always thought of Trent as being the Dave Navarro of high school… Considering a girl like Carmen Electra couldn’t maintain true love with Dave Navarro; and Sandra Bullock couldn’t whip Jesse James into commitment; and Pam Anderson couldn’t land Tommy Lee or Kid Rock or Tommy Lee. All epic fails.” How profound.

More feminist goodness, this time from Echidne of the Snakes and touching on the “burqa debate” and how women dress in different societies and cultures.

Again, an old-school article from The New York Times entitled “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?”. This is (apparently) what’s wrong with Cinderella and the other Disney princesses:

“…‘I see girls expanding their imagination through visualising themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be.’

Mooney [who produced the above quote] has a point: There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs—who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty—are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception…

The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princesses have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs—doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks, Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we‘ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves—flowing through Ally McBeal, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex & the City—of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something hat felt essentially and exclusively female.”

Following on from this, Rachel Hills of Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, writing in The Australian Literary Review in July 2008, untangles the sexualisation of children. Again, well worth the read.

We’ve gotta give the guys some attention, too, and Newsweek does just that with “Men’s Lib” and retrosexualisation:

“Since the 1950s, the image of American women has gone through numerous makeovers. But masculine expectations remain the same… The term ‘retrosexual’ has all but replaced ‘metrosexual’ in the lifestyle sections of national magazines, which are full of stories about affluent urbanites wearing hunting garb, buying designer axes and writing about the art of manliness on blogs with names like (ahem) The Art of Manliness.”